When I was growing up there was a serious flash flood in our small city. The saddest story from that time, which is hard to ever forget, was what happened at a nursing home. I think somebody was evacuating two elderly residents and the elevator kicked into emergency mode and did what it was programmed to do - descend to the bottom floor and stay there. Unfortunately the bottom floor was underwater and the people all drowned.

Actually, there's something about it on the NOAA site. It was a nurse's aide and three people in wheelchairs. Like I said, really hard to forget that mental picture.

Many years ago I was playing D&D with some friends and four of us came to find ourselves trapped in a room with rising water, a hole in the ceiling, and a rope dangling from the hole within easy reach (don't ask how we got there, that sort of thing happens in D&D all the time). We literally spent 20 minutes arguing amongst ourselves about how we were going to get out of that one. That's the general flow of a D&D session.

When you work in construction you never know what the day has in store for you. On big jobs the unpredictability is part of the allure.In Manhattan, building a 60 story highrise structure on a footprint no larger than itself concentrates the dangerous actions of many trades into a small area all at once.